Immigrant'
game no joke
to this Tech student

Published: Saturday, May 03, 2008

MARLENA HARTZ

At ritzy receptions in the nation's capital, Tomas Resendiz has been mistaken for a waiter. Other guests have handed him empty glasses and turned to him for more cocktails. Despite his suit and tie. Despite his impressive title: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Liaison for U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

Texas Tech student Tomas Resendiz wrote a letter of awareness in response to a student group conducting a game called "Catch the Illegal Immigrant" at the university. Resendiz, whose father brought his family to the United States, keeps a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence on his wall as a reminder of the original immigrants to the country.

"Sometimes people don't look (at what a person is wearing). They just look up here," said Resendiz, circling his face.

Even if they had looked at his outfit or asked his title, they'd only have a small part of his story.

It is a past that illuminates his strong opposition to a T-shirt, his subsequent decision to write to the university's president and his local role in national debate about the future of America.

Resendiz, 22, is an ambitious student at Texas Tech. He is the first in his family, including his five siblings, to successfully pursue a college degree. His parents never finished primary school, according to two of their sons. They worked all of their lives, so it is difficult for them to fully understand Resendiz's college pursuits.

Last year, when the undergraduate told his father, a former illegal immigrant who is now a U.S. citizen, about his internship with Cuellar in Washington, D.C., his father responded, "Have you found a job yet?" Resendiz said.

Resendiz was one of two students who wrote a letter to Tech President Jon Whitmore alerting him that an ideological club, the Young Conservatives of Texas, had played a game called "Catch the Illegal Immigrant" on campus in March.

His co-writer, Francisco Debaran, declined to comment for this report.

As part of the game, some Conservatives wore T-shirts that read "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT" on the fronts and "CATCH ME IF YOU CAN" on the backs, while others tried to catch them for a prize.

The club's chairman, Tech student Cullin Davis, said they played the game to protest a law that gives illegal immigrants tuition breaks and to raise awareness of the illegal immigration issue as a whole.

Republican student clubs have been stirring up campuses with the game since at least 2006, but this was the first time the Tech club had played it, Davis said.

There's a possibility the Tech Conservatives will stage another game in the fall semester, he said.

"We got people talking about (illegal immigration), so we've done our part," said Davis, a self-confessed political aficionado.

The Conservatives do have a right to play the game on campus, Whitmore responded in a letter to Resendiz. But the game does go against the "diverse and welcoming atmosphere" he and other administrators are trying to cultivate, he wrote.

"There are strong emotions on two or three different sides of this issue ... and we want all those sides to have a forum. ... That's how we think we can live and learn," said Whitmore, who in his letter mentioned several future campus events that will address the issue.

One will be Tech's second symposium on the topic of immigration, which has been set for this fall, he said.

Five days after the president sent his letter to the students, a university ethics committee also denounced the game in a statement. The committee was formed in 2003 to meet regional accreditation requirements and is supposed to submit a report in 2020 to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools showing how the university accomplished its self-selected goals of enhancing diversity and strengthening ethics, said Bill Marcy, Tech's provost and the leader on accreditation. The committee is considering having a formal discussion about the game as part of those goals, he said.

"Messages such as catch an illegal immigrant' are hardly welcoming. They recall post-Pearl Harbor actions to round up all persons of Japanese descent ... and post-9/11 suggestions that all persons of Middle Eastern appearance are potential terrorists. Such suggestions are no different in principle from racial profiling. Even though such messages are protected under the First Amendment as free speech, they are simply inconsistent with the ethical values of this university," the statement reads.

It was sent to faculty and committee members, said Marcy, a co-signer of the document.

Davis, the Young Conservatives chairman, said he resents that race has become an issue. It wasn't for the club members who played the game in March, he said.

"(Immigration) is not a racial issue," he said.

Although all of the students who wore the T-shirts on campus that day were white, the racial makeup of the Tech chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas matches that of the university, Davis said.

About 80 percent of Tech students are white.

Changing that ratio to better reflect statewide and local demographics has been a long-stated goal of university administrators and of the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Tech administrators, however, are trying not to take sides on the immigration issue.

"We are trying to make students think critically about how best to get a position across and put themselves in other peoples' shoes," Marcy said.

Making it through

Resendiz's shoes certainly weren't custom-made for college.

He said he grew up splitting his time between classrooms and farms, where he cleared cotton fields and did other manual labor.

He, his mother and his siblings legally migrated to a Panhandle town from Mexico when Resendiz was 9 years old, he said.

He did poorly in high school. He never thought college would be an option until he worked at a factory in Petersburg before his senior year of high school. Most of the employees were Hispanic, he said, and were worn down by low wages and monotonous schedules. Some urged young Resendiz to take a different path.

He was accepted at Tech despite his bad grades, but it hasn't been all highs since.

He worked in a factory and as a landscaper and a construction worker in his freshman year - financial aid was then a mystery, he said.

Usually, he is the only minority, or one of a very few, in his classes, he said.

"Sometimes, I look back and I can't believe I made it through," he said.

Resendiz plans to finish his senior year studying abroad in Hong Kong and to pursue law school once he graduates, he said, fiddling with the senior ring he said he bought as a symbol of his college success.